Cloudy with a chance of scaling: Keeping your highly scaled application highly available using the cloud

As our applications grow, keeping them operational is challenging. High growth means more data, more computation, and more opportunities for problems.

The cloud offers the ability to improve scalability while maintaining availability. Lee Atchison explains the “keep two mistakes high” principal and how to use the cloud to keep applications healthy and growing while keeping costs inline. The cloud can be used as an improved data center, giving us the capacity we need when we need it to keep our applications running. Additionally, the cloud can provide redundancy and parallel capacity that allows us to increase our tolerance to problems, reduce the risk of our application failing, and increase our ability to handle important compliance requirements.

As mobile and IoT applications become more and more prevalent, data handling at scale is becoming more and more critical. The cloud can help us here by providing unique and useful alternatives to traditional computing to keep our application operating, even with increased data volume. By giving us the ability to grow our computational capacity and our data handling capabilities essentially endlessly, the cloud gives us the ability to handle our increased user needs. Doing this in a way that doesn’t cost us a fortune yet keeps our application highly available does not come automatically. But it can be accomplished with the right techniques.

This session is sponsored by New Relic.

Lee Atchison

New Relic

Lee Atchison is the principal cloud architect and advocate at New Relic, where he designs and leads the building of the New Relic infrastructure products and helps New Relic architect a solid service-based system architecture that scales as they have grown from a simple SaaS startup to a high-traffic public enterprise. Lee has a specific expertise in building highly available systems and has 28 years of industry experience. He learned cloud-based, scalable systems during his seven years as a senior manager at Amazon, where he led the creation of the company’s first software download store, created AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and led the team that managed the migration of Amazon’s retail platform from a monolith to a service-based architecture. Lee is the author of the book Architecting for Scale, published in 2016 by O’Reilly Media.